A letter from House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) demands an explanation from the Treasury Department on why it allowed $3 billion in payments to ObamaCare insurance companies that Congress never approved.

In a well-documented piece, Philip Klein gives a disturbing summary of the Obama administration deliberately refusing to follow the law.

“At issue are payments to insurers known as cost-sharing subsidies,” writes Klein. “These payments come about because President Obama’s healthcare law forces insurers to limit out-of-pocket costs for certain low income individuals by capping consumer expenses, such as deductibles and co-payments, in insurance plans. In exchange for capping these charges, insurers are supposed to receive compensation.”

To have an attorney general of the United States say that the force of government must be used, forever, to enshrine into law what used to be called 'reverse discrimination' is for him to say that American law will always put skin color above other considerations – and pick winners accordingly.

At National Review Online on Tuesday, columnist John Fund blasted Attorney General Eric Holder for advocating permanent racial discrimination in favor of black Americans. His column is “must” reading. Holder’s position is mind-boggling. It pushes the extreme edges of racialism. Anything approaching those far edges is immoral. It must never be accepted.

Here is the “money” quote from Fund’s column:

Last month, in an appearance at Columbia University, his alma mater, Holder made a jarring statement in support of racial preferences, saying he “can’t actually imagine a time in which the need for more diversity would ever cease.” “Affirmative action has been an issue since segregation practices,” he declared. “The question is not when does it end, but when does it begin. . . . When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?”

This is rubbish. First, “affirmative action” (henceforth “AA”) and “diversity” are not the same thing. Diversity, a reasonable goal in a diverse country, can be promoted without deliberately giving preferences to one group by virtue of its skin color.

Second, even when hiding AA’s implicit quota system behind fig-leaf disguises, as the University of Michigan famously did in the Grutter v. Bollingercase, AA by its very nature denies “benefits” that otherwise would accrue to members of other ethnic groups, in order to assist blacks. This is hardly a new observation, of course, but it bears repeating because Holder’s use of the word “entitled” amounts to an insistence that some people are less entitled than others.

At Red State, “Repair Man Jack” notes the horrible injustices done against Asian Americans in the name of affirmative action for blacks:

If all other credentials are equal, Asian-Americans need to score 140 points more than whites, 270 points higher than Hispanics, and 450 points above African-Americans out of a maximum 1600 on the math and reading SAT to have the same chance of admission to a private college,…

This is not just a matter of college admissions. The Holder/Obama Justice Department is going to the mat to discriminate against white applicants to the heroic Fire Department of New York in favor of black applicants who missed as many as 70 percent of the questions on a simple fire-academy entrance exam. It has deliberately chosen to ignore laws against vote fraud in order to help boost the supposed interests of black voters. Indeed, as I have written numerous times here, whistle-blowing former Justice Department lawyer J. Christian Adams has detailed in his book Injustice manifold examples of jaw-dropping, racialist bias in Holder’s domain.

But Holder can’t win his way on all these things unless nobody fights back. In an outrageous case in which his minions in effect argued that a North Carolina town’s black citizens don’t even recognize their own best interests – interests which the Justice Department literally equated with Democratic Party identification – the Holder team finally was forced to back down after being faced with ignominious defeat. As Adams has pointed out in numerous columns and blog posts, this is starting to be a pattern: When challenged in court, the Holder team often suffers setbacks or is otherwise flummoxed.

Not only that, but Holder already has had to accept resignations from some of the key people responsible for his racialist agenda within Justice. When the light is shined on their shenanigans, the heat apparently becomes nearly unbearable.

This is as it should be. Racial discrimination is a horrible thing. Black Americans suffered from such discrimination to an extent hard to imagine today. Racial bias no doubt still exists – in many directions, from many directions – and it ought always to be fought.

But to have an attorney general of the United States say that the force of government must be used, forever, to enshrine into law what used to be called “reverse discrimination” is for him to say that American law will always put skin color above other considerations – and pick winners accordingly.

This is not the rule of law as most Americans understand the very concept, and it certainly violates every reasonable notion of equal justice under the law.

The U.S. Supreme Court has now accepted a new challenge to affirmative action. It will test whether Holder’s reactionary view still holds sway. By verbally pushing the envelope so far, Holder may actually have hurt his own case by demonstrating that no reason or evidence will ever suffice to end reverse discrimination. Let us hope the high court thinks so.

"Hillary Clinton's lack of transparency is newsworthy as investigators attempt to ascertain her work around the time of the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi. Certainly the media could stay quite busy investigating how Clinton communicated with her colleagues and the White House, how secure her email communications were, whether they were hacked, who was privy to this law-breaking (…[more]

—Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, The Federalist Senior Editor

— Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, The Federalist Senior Editor

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